Room 421, Friday Evening

[whateverknight]

Squall carried the last of the boxes into Rinoa's room and stacked it on top of the others with relief. They were HEAVY. Inside the boxes were thousands upon thousands of files, the criminal records of the entire country of Galbadia, and Rinoa's father was entrusting her with them so that she could determine who was or wasn't justly imprisoned.

Comments

[angelo_wings]

Rinoa crackled her knuckles, once, then took the cover off the first crate. Immediately, she blew the dust away that had settled on the records. Her father wasn't kidding about how old these were.

"He's stalling on Timber," she huffed. "Or else he's too busy to do much with it. But he's at least moving forward, or so he claims. And he's letting me do this. So ... that's something."

Yes. She was getting along better with him. She was hesitant to admit it. It might hurt more when her father betrayed her trust again.

She was pulling files out of the crate and flipping through them, scanning for information.

"Okay, good, they're typed and not handwritten," she said. "So I don't have to decipher someone's chickenscratch."

[whateverknight]

Squall nodded thoughtfully. "These should have been entered into a database," he decided. "They don't seem to have cared about these people at all."

He pulled out a file and looked at it blankly. "Do you want me to help?"

[angelo_wings]

Rinoa had already seated herself on the floor, fanning the files out around in a semicircle. She stopped long enough to raise an eyebrow at him.

"Do you want to help?" she asked. "You don't sound like you do."

'Fess up, Squall.

[whateverknight]

Squall shrugged. "Not really, but this is a lot to do all by yourself. And I don't have anything better to do."

[angelo_wings]

"This is also seriously important work to do on behalf of the lives of people in the Timbran and Galbadian countries who have been imprisoned for the better part of two decades," she said, darkly, "and I'm not going to drag you into it if you're going to half-ass it and not take it seriously."

Oh, hey, Rinoa was going to be like that about it. This was going to be fun.

[whateverknight]

"I don't half-ass important things," Squall told her flatly. "I'm taking it very seriously. But I won't lie and say this looks like fun, either."

[angelo_wings]

Oh. Oh. This was such a Look, that Squall was getting.

"You think I called my father, made a special trip to Galbadia, and decided to be an unpaid secretary because I was lacking in fun?"

[whateverknight]

"Of course not," Squall told her. "I think you're doing it out of a sense of duty, because you feel it's the right thing to do." ...Was he wrong about that?